Democracy means different things to different people

Democracy. It has been the driving force behind our involvement in several wars. Most recently, Iraq. Maybe next, Syria, if we can ever figure out which Syrian rebels actually aspire to democracy, instead of just a different type of tyranny.

But how will we really know? When syndicated columnist Tom Friedman snuck into Syria early this month and asked one rebel commander to talk about the revolution, the guy said that the Islamist parties “want Shariah, and we want democracy.”

The trouble is, democracy means different things to different people. So when as a nation, and as a government, we aspire to support and spread and share democracy with people who have never before been blessed with its liberties, we need to understand what it means. Not to us, but to them.

I already mentioned Iraq. Take a look at the democracy there. Yes, it means free elections and an outcome that represents the will of the majority. But that’s where the similarity between American democracy and Iraqi democracy ends. Here at home, democracy means that within a few weeks of the election, the winner has the loser over to the house for white turkey chili. In Iraq, the winner — the majority’s choice — does what he can to silence the losers — the minority — maybe to crush them, and in response, the losers set off bombs to obstruct the winner’s governance.

Or, look at Egypt. Democracy under Mohammed Morsi still looks freer than democracy under Hosni Mubarak — if you have questions, look at Mubarak’s nearly 90 percent of the vote the last time he was “elected.” But Egypt’s democracy today is hardly akin to America’s. When a proposed constitution for Egypt is written exclusively by one side — because the other side is boycotting the process — it sure doesn’t look like the democracy for which we had high hopes.

And that’s to say nothing of the meaning of democracy in Saudi Arabia. Of course, there isn’t any. But it’s instructive to know one of the main reasons why, which was explained to me once by a member of the royal family during a flight across that desert nation. I asked him why people like him, with education and wealth and standing in the world, didn’t democratize their nation (as if the question itself didn’t implicitly provide a large part of the answer). “Have you ever thought,” he asked me back, “about too much democracy?” Think about that: to us, democracy means freedom. To them, it means too much freedom. Freedom to violate social, religious, and gender values that many people there think have served them well for a millennium.

But that’s not even the end of the spectrum of democracy’s meaning. A couple of years ago I shot a program in Russia. It was about Russian politics, and the fact that after yearning for decades for democracy, the Russian people really only had it for a comparatively brief moment. Slowly but surely, their newly-acquired freedoms — forming political parties, protesting about their politics — were diluted, mainly by President Putin.

So one day I interviewed a member of the opposition in the Russian Parliament — whose own political party, by the way, has since been disqualified — and when I asked him, how has Putin gotten away with it, why haven’t the people protested the loss of their short-lived liberties, his answer was straightforward and simple: when the Soviet Union fell apart, “Everything bad,” he said, “got worse: inflation, unemployment, corruption…. And the name for that,” he said, “was ‘democracy.’” Russians still have more freedoms today than they had in the bad old days, but to many of them, democracy became a dirty word.

As we know all too well, our own democracy isn’t perfect. As Winston Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government… except for all the others.”

So in choosing up sides, in Syria and elsewhere, American policymakers had better beware: democracy everywhere is not likely to look like the democracy we know. It won’t always be pretty. But then, neither is ours.

Greg Dobbs of Evergreen covered the Middle East for many years as a correspondent for ABC News and HDNet television.

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

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